A Movie Dedicated to the Tricky Ties That Bind:

courtesy of A24

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In the astounding, atmospheric, award-winning faux home movie Krisha, twentysomething director Trey Edward Shults employs his uncle's house as a set and several close family members as principal players in a riveting vérité sketch about the titular character—a wayward daughter, sister, and mother (the director himself plays her son) who's trying to return to the family fold and heal old wounds after a lost decade of hard living. It's a movie that cuts to home truths deeply and unerringly.

A Rumination on High-Tech Warfare:

Bleecker Street

Helen Mirren slays as a steely British colonel bent on raining holy hell (in the form of a drone's Hellfire missile) on Islamist bomb makers in the middle of a Nairobi neighborhood in Eye in the Sky. The moral dilemmas of high-tech warfare are ratcheted up mercilessly as other decision makers with more qualms (played by Aaron Paul and the late Alan Rickman) push back on the colonel, and the tiny, authentically real surveillance devices employed are jaw-dropping to watch in this state-of-the-art thriller.

A Crowd Pleaser About a Pre-WWII Athletic Hero:

Focus Features

The incomparable American athletic hero Jesse Owens (Stephan James), groomed by his tough-love coach (Jason Sudeikis) amid the pervasively racist atmosphere of Ohio State University during the Great Depression, won a wildly improbable four gold medals while Adolf Hitler watched grimly at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; in the family-friendly period docudrama titled, simply, Race, we're also treated to subplots involving everything from rival love interests to the flamboyant German director Leni Riefenstahl.